Elie Wiesel (10 page)

“Next morning I registered for the convoy.”

The police officer seemed courteous and amiable. He rose to greet his visitor and the interpreter. He shook the stranger’s hand and begged him to have a chair. He went so far as to offer refreshment. A cup of coffee? A glass of
tzuika?

“Water,” said Malkiel.

“Bravo. It pays to be careful, especially in the morning.”

An orderly brought a bottle of mineral water with three glasses. The official, a perfect host, poured. Malkiel sipped at his; Lidia was not thirsty.

“And how has your visit here gone along, Domnul Rosenbaum?”

“Very well.”

“No problems?”

“None at all.”

“Have you seen what you came to see?”

Shrewd, this fellow. “Not everything,” Malkiel said.

“I don’t understand.”

“They must have told you—my specialty is funerary inscriptions, epitaphs. You have an abundance of them here.”

“They did tell me. But … why choose our cemeteries? Why not the ones at Cluj or Satu Mare?”

“These are older.”

The official consulted a file before going on. “You won’t tell me that the cemetery is the only part of our little town that interests you.”

“Indeed I won’t. My charming interpreter was kind enough to show me other places.”

The official turned to Lidia and said a few words that made her blush.

“What did he say to you, Lidia?”

“He suggested I persuade you that the living are more fun to be with than the dead.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Tell him I get the impression he doesn’t believe me.”

The official’s face darkened. “Am I wrong?”

“To suspect me? Frankly, yes. And anyway, what do you suspect me of?”

“I don’t know yet. But rummaging through cemeteries strikes me as suspicious.”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of my contacts with the dead.”

“I’ll tell you whatever I like.”

“Did I offend you? I was only joking.”

The official inspected him for a moment and then brightened. “Well, so was I. Your health, sir.” He raised his glass of water.

“And yours, sir,” Malkiel said.

“How long do you plan to stay with us?”

“That will depend.”

“On whom?”

“On my boss.”

The official jotted a note in the file. “Do you plan to publish articles about your stay here?”

“Of course.”

“All on the cemetery?”

“All for the obituary page.”

The rest of the interview was devoted to the weather in New York and Bucharest, to the pleasures of world travel on an expense account, and to friendship among the peoples of the world.

“Thank you for coming,” the officer said, extending his hand to Malkiel. “I hope your visit here continues to be pleasant and peaceful. See to it, miss.”

Lidia refrained from translating her reply.

Driven by his overwhelming need to tell all, to omit nothing, Elhanan spoke in breathless tones. “Are you listening to me, Malkiel my son? Do you remember our lessons in Talmud? And Rav Nahman? Before his final breath he begged his friend Rava to tell the Angel of Death to spare him pain. He feared suffering more than death.… You must tell him yourself, said Rava; isn’t your voice heard on high? I know nothing about that, Rav Nahman confessed, but I know that there is no defense against the Angel of Death. And the two masters went on talking, and then Rava said, I have a favor to ask: could you return from above to tell me if you did suffer in leaving this world below? Rav Nahman promised to do that. And after his death, he appeared to Rava in a dream. Rava asked, Well? What is it like to die? Is it painful? And Rav Nahman said, Not at all. It’s like when you pluck
a hair out of a bowl of milk; that’s how the soul leaves the body. And yet, he added, if God, blessed be His name, asked me to come back to earth, I would answer, No, Lord; I am not strong enough for that; I would be too afraid of death.”

Malkiel did remember that Talmudic legend but had forgotten its profound beauty. On first hearing, it had sounded more like an anecdote. Now it resonated within him.

That occurred before the accident. His father was sick. But it was nothing serious, a chill, the flu. But running a high temperature, Elhanan feared death. “Do you understand me, my son?”

“I understand you,” Malkiel said.

“Right now, when everything hurts, what bothers me most is that I can’t see you clearly.”

“I’m here, Father.”

“And yesterday? Where were you yesterday? And the day before? And last week? I closed my eyes, opened them, looked for you. You were somewhere far away.”

“I didn’t know you’d caught cold.”

“I’m burning up, aren’t I? Aren’t I burning?”

“You have a fever. The doctor said it was a touch of pneumonia. It will run its course.”

“Is the whole city burning, too?”

“It’s snowing out.”

“And in Berlin?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

“Isn’t Berlin burning?”

“It’s wintertime, Father.”

“What were you doing in Berlin?”

“Covering a story,” Malkiel lied.

A lie, a shameless lie. Malkiel had spent a few weeks in Berlin because—because a young German reporter, a
woman, was there. Love at first sight? More like a fleeting madness over a stupid quarrel with Tamar. In a rage she’d shouted, “It’s all over between us!” All he did was nod stupidly. Tamar rushed out, slamming the door, and Malkiel did nothing to hold her back. Days of depression, nights of gloom. “Couldn’t you send me on assignment somewhere?” he asked his boss. “I need to clear my head.” “How about a trip to Germany?” the sage answered. “Germany! Never! Anywhere but Germany.” He preferred not to think about Germany. For him, Germany was pained Jewish memory. And he had had enough of that. Enough of living in the shadow of Silesian smokestacks. Enough of remembering those Jews beaten and destroyed, those children incinerated, those women shamed, those starving old men whose huge eyes stared out at a cold and cynical universe. Enough of moving about under the gaze of the dead. Let them vanish, let them leave the living alone.…

By a bizarre coincidence he met Inge on the ninth day of the month of Av, on Tisha-b’ Av, a day of mourning and commemoration, of fasting and affliction: on that day we remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Inge and Malkiel met in the elevator at the newspaper. They walked along together in Times Square, made small talk and introduced themselves. “Inge Edelstein, German.”

“Malkiel Rosenbaum, Jewish.”

She threw him a startled glance. “It doesn’t bother you to be walking with a German girl?” No, it didn’t upset him; a reporter can’t always choose his companions. “Shall we stop for a cup of coffee?” Why not? He was about to take a sip when he remembered his father: Elhanan was fasting until sundown. “You won’t drink it?” No, he wouldn’t drink it. “It’s not good coffee?” No, it wasn’t that. “Then what is it?”

He explained to her.

“No,” she cried. “You can’t be serious. Your temple was destroyed two thousand years ago and you’re grieving
today?
” Yes, as if it had happened only yesterday. “A lot of people have told me the Jews were crazy,” she said. “They were right.” Yes, we’re crazy. “It’s human nature to forget what hurts you, isn’t it? Wasn’t forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it, life would be intolerable, wouldn’t it?” Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiba. If he denies memory he will have denied his own honor. “So you insist on keeping all your wounds open?” Those wounds exist; it is therefore forbidden and unhealthy to pretend that they don’t.

They met again the following Sunday. And Monday. And Thursday. They loved each other.…

“Fever, my son. I feel the mists rising again. Exhausted, the body can do no more. Defeated, the spirit listens in vain for even a bitter music. How can I put the world together again? Those hands holding me down are not my own; how can I cast them off?”

Tamar, Malkiel thought; Tamar would have known how to cast them off. Reconstruct a whole world? Tamar would have known how to do that, too. Why did I follow Inge to Berlin? Didn’t I know it would bring unhappiness to my father?

Like an idiot, he had gone knocking on the boss’s door. “I’ll do it. I’ll go to Berlin if you want me to.”

“A good idea,” said the sage, scrutinizing him. “Isn’t the Jewish cemetery in Berlin one of the largest in the world? Readers will go for that.”

The sage was no fool. He knew it wasn’t the cemetery
that drew me to Berlin. And my father in all this? Left alone, and sick. Nothing serious? Nothing that antibiotics wouldn’t cure? Nothing linked to the disease that would destroy him later? Such excuses were too convenient. I was wrong to go.

“The mists are rising,” Elhanan said. “I see Jerusalem. Would you like to know what I see?”

“Yes, Father. What do you see?”

“Near our home in Jerusalem, in the Mea Shearim neighborhood, was a garden where old men came to live out their last days. They spent hours sitting there motionless, like statues. Sometimes I went up to them and asked questions. ‘What did you do before you came here?’ They looked at me in a daze. The word ‘before’ stunned them. But among them was a woman of incomparable sweetness. She invited me to sit down beside her, and said to me, ‘We have a whole life to live, just as you have, even if it only lasts one hour, the last hour—and no flowers to pick.’ The next morning I went back to the garden with a bouquet I’d promised myself I would give her. Only … she was no longer there.”

Did he come down with that stupid fever because of me? Loretta, Loretta, why didn’t you pay more attention, keep a closer eye on him? And Tamar, why did you send me away?

I should never have gone. I was wrong to follow Inge, wrong to leave my father alone, wrong to lie to him, wrong to begin an affair with that German girl.

And yet Malkiel had fallen in love with her. And she with him. In Berlin their love seemed even more miraculous than in New York. Each embrace brought them new discovery of their bodies, new potential, a flight of each beyond the other, within the other. Together they bridged the gap between Jew and German, promise and threat, happiness and
suffering. Together they defied fate, lending it an innocent face, the smiling face of reconciliation if not forgiveness. Hand in hand they strolled the lively streets of the Third Reich’s former capital, lingered at elegant shopwindows, visited museums, public gardens, libraries, admired rebuilt neighborhoods, applauded at the theater and at concerts, laughed with the schoolchildren they passed in early morning or late afternoon. It was so simple to attract happiness; all they had to do was set aside the past, turn the page. All Malkiel needed to be happy was not to think of his father. But … he thought of him. Even more than before. The man who changed his money at the bank—where was he during the war? And this bureaucrat explaining Berlin’s municipal politics—how old was he in 1943? Was he old enough to have served in the SS special units? And Inge—did she have parents? Who were they? Slowly, bit by bit, Malkiel felt his happiness drain away. In the end Inge noticed the change. She wanted to be clear in her own mind about it. It’s my father, Malkiel confessed. My father keeps me from forgetting. And, the height of paradox, she said that Elhanan was right. I know, she told Malkiel; none of it must be forgotten. I love you because I don’t want to forget; you can’t love me because you have to remember. Intelligent, Inge. Honest and demanding. It’s because I think of your father, she told Malkiel, and of his father, and of all the Jewish fathers that our fathers murdered, that I love you with a love that is doomed. Muddled, torn apart by urges and loyalties, Malkiel sank into despair.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, Inge went to synagogue with him. Old men were chanting the Kol Nidre, that overwhelming poem by which the Marranos had reaffirmed their loyalty to the covenant. Seated among the women, Inge could not watch Malkiel. He was weeping like a child. Like the child within him that had not wept at his mother’s
death. As he did every year, he fasted until Yom Kippur was over, and attended all the services. Inge, too. “Do you still love me?” he asked her when they met in the evening. “More than ever,” she answered. “Do you know,” he asked, “that the most common word in our Yom Kippur prayers doesn’t relate to forgiveness, or expiation, but remembrance?” She did not know that. They spent the night rediscovering each other.

That was long ago and far away.

“You’re doing better,” Malkiel said. “You’ll be fine now.”

A fresh wave of fever racked his father’s body. Elhanan had to make an effort to speak. “One day in Kolomey … did I ever tell you what I saw in Kolomey?”

“No. But don’t talk anymore now. Tomorrow, all right?”

“In Kolomey I saw what I see now: a woman slipping into shadow, another writhing in pain under a blazing sun. I want to know them, tear off their veils, but I’m afraid to see them close up; I’m afraid I’ll discover death’s claw marks. Still, isn’t it worth trying? Even if it hurts? Even if it scares me?”

“The will to live is always worth it.”

“That’s what your mother always told me. Did I tell you about your mother, Malkiel?”

“Not enough, Father.”

“You must never forget her. I must never forget her.”

Did he already sense that an illness of another kind would transform his mind to heartbreak?

Outside, on the Hudson, a thousand shadows huddled beneath the rain.

“
So, Malkiel my son, you’ve finally made up your mind?
”

“
Yes, Father, I’m leaving.
”

“
When?
”

“
Tomorrow night.
”

“
Nonstop?
”

“
One stop in Paris.
”

“
You’ll be careful?
”

“
I promise.
”

“
You won’t forget?
”

“
Forget what?
”

“
Keep your eyes and ears open, look and listen: you must represent me. I want to see everything with your eyes, and hear everything with your ears.
”